Music

When I was sixteen, obese, bullied, gay and struggling with mental health, my mother took me to audition for the vocal music program of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). I'll be grateful for that sharp-witted act of hers forever. I have not since then studied music formally, but through the teaching I enjoyed (under then-not-yet-Dr. James Brown, whom we just called Jimmy, and later briefly with Dr. Andreas Giger at the Louisiana State University), I still nourish some devotion to the topic. 

Here is a list of my posts on classical music to date, mostly centering on opera:

On the best staging of an opera I've ever seen: Verdi's Macbeth in Zurich by Barry Kosky

A five-part essay on the opera Salome by Richard Strauss and its shocking rejection of chastity in favor of an all-annihilating desire.

A review of the Wagnerian baritone Michael Volle singing Schubert's Winterreise. Helmut Deutsch accompanied. Both were excellent, particularly Deutsch, but was too much too little?

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, with a focus on different aspects of its difficulty and its power for the amateur listener (four parts), with a respectful consideration of the opera's relentlessness.

The mysteries of the Johannespassion by Bach. The music has a power that I attempt to describe, and in doing so I was forced to wonder about the psychology of Bach himself.